


Treasure from the Sea

by unnieunnie



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: As requested a happy ending, Fantasy, Injury/illness recovery, M/M, Minor pining, Seaside, Some mentions of illness, Some mentions of violence, Tan is the smartest one around, Two fools being foolish, everybody has a secret, post-war AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:20:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23203105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unnieunnie/pseuds/unnieunnie
Summary: All Minseok had hoped for in his post-war life was a quiet life by the sea.The sea gave him a beautiful man with a secret, instead.
Relationships: Kim Jongdae | Chen/Kim Minseok | Xiumin
Comments: 21
Kudos: 135
Collections: SnowSpark Fest Round One





	Treasure from the Sea

**Author's Note:**

> For prompt 69 (nice) - I hope I did it justice for you! <3

Minseok loved his early morning walks along the shore – nothing was more emblematic of his post-retirement life than a slow stroll with Tan gamboling around him under brightening skies and only the sound of the waves and the seabirds. He’d wanted peace, and he found it.

Finding other things was just a bonus: when he first moved to his little cliffside cottage, he’d picked up every pretty shell and bit of seaglass, until he ran out of flat surfaces for them all and greater exposure made him more discerning. He’d found plenty of other interesting things over the 4 years of his retirement, things like the antique sextant, worn stone carvings that he’d sold to some scholars in town, and once a small leather pouch of what turned out to be uncut gemstones that he kept very carefully hidden in his house.

The body on the beach wasn’t the first one of those he had found, either. That was a way to rather ruin one’s morning. Tan noticed it first, darting forward to sniff at the form, paw at the sand next to it. Minseok tightened his grip on his walking stick and approached the corpse. He’d ensure the poor soul got to the priests for a proper cremation, even if it would be impossible to determine their identity. It wasn’t as if he was unused to seeing the dead.

From the back, it looked to be a man, not old, and close to his own modest size, with a wild tangle of long black hair strewn across the sand. Minseok reached down and heaved the body over onto its back.

What a shame. He’d been handsome, with a strong chin and brows, sharp cheekbones. And so young. Not in the water long, either – he was barely bloated and not chewed up by fish at all. The only lividity on the body was a constellation of bruises on the torso. Perhaps they’d be able to find his family after all and spare them the pain of not knowing.

Minseok leaned down and braced his feet in the sand to drag the body’s legs out of the water. He could cover it in seaweed to give it some protection from the birds while he walked to town to fetch a priest.

He curved his hands under the body’s armpits. They were oddly warm for a corpse that had been in the water. He leaned backwards and pulled.

The man grimaced.

Minseok was so shocked that he dropped the man to the sand, where he frowned again but didn’t wake, though his head turned to one side.

Not a body, then. A much more pressing issue.

Minseok stripped off his jacket and draped it over the man’s torso to protect it from the sun while he hustled back to his cottage for a blanket to make dragging him easier. By the time he’d worked the man onto the wool, tied it around his waist, and pulled the man home, his right leg was screaming with pain, but at least the man was indoors out of the water and the sun. Minseok gave himself a few moments to catch his breath and rub the cramp out of his calf. Tan nosed at the man’s shoulder and licked it once.

He went through all the motions of rescue: heaved the guy over a bucket, squeezing his belly and pounding his back until he vomited and coughed up a large amount of water; dribbled fresh water between his cracked lips; wiped his body clean and rubbed oil on it to minimize salt and sun damage; tucked the man into a pallet of blankets and mats on the floor, on his side in case he coughed or threw up again.

It wasn’t particularly encouraging that the man did no more than feebly struggle during the first part.

But he was still alive the next morning, and his head moved when Minseok spooned water into his mouth. It was possible that his body hadn’t yet noticed that the brain driving it was gone, but Minseok hoped to be wrong. He rubbed a little more oil on the man’s cracked lips, and Tan curled up in a crescent against the man’s belly.

Minseok spent the day indoors to hover over the man. By early afternoon, the boredom of this was profound enough that Minseok talked to the man while he cooked his own lunch, and found himself reading aloud from his book just to cut the silence – which never seemed to bother him when he was alone. It was strange. He talked to Tan plenty but had never felt the desire to _read_ to the cat.

He was washing the dinner dishes when he heard a rustle and a rough cough from behind him. Minseok rushed over, cup in hand, and the man was thrashing feebly among the blankets. But his eyes were open, dark and alarmed under brows tilted toward one another.

“You’re all right,” Minseok said.

He knelt slowly and set the cup down, hands open on his knees.

“I won’t harm you. You came out of the sea.”

The man stopped thrashing and gazed at him, coughed again. His mouth moved, but the only sound was another cough.

“Some water?”

The man nodded. Minseok held his head and helped him drink.

“Where am I?” the man asked in a voice as rough as sharkskin when Minseok put the cup down.

“Elyxion.”

The man grimaced. Minseok couldn’t help the smile that quirked up one side of his mouth. Not a local, then.

“A very backwater, out-of-the-way part of Elyxion,” he added. “Everyone here belongs to the sea more than anywhere else. In case you’re worried.”

Minseok wondered what some of his former comrades would make of that statement. He figured the ones he still respected would laugh wryly and inquire about any empty houses. The half-drowned man chewed his bottom lip – just a little, but enough to make it bleed, given how dried out he was from exposure and seawater. Minseok held up the cup again for him to drink, wiped his face with a damp cloth, and helped him to sit up.

“I’m Minseok. Is there anything I can call you?”

There was another sharp glance, then some of the wariness bled out of the man’s expression.

“Chen,” he rasped.

“I’m glad you’re still among the living, Chen.”

“Thank you for that.”

Minseok shrugged.

“I take what the sea gives me,” he said.

Not that Chen was much of a gift over the next several days. He drank more water and a bit of broth, then woke after many hours’ sleep to hiss and lean heavily on Minseok’s arm in the privy, his breath unsteady with pain while he pissed. Minseok had to pretty well haul him back indoors and wipe all the sweat off for him.

“You have to drink a lot more,” Minseok said. “The pain’ll ease up once your kidneys get used to working again.”

Chen grimaced but took the cup. He insisted on hanging onto Minseok’s walking stick to hobble back and forth to the privy all day. By the evening he reported less pain, but sweat still stood out on his skin, his cheeks were flushed, and his dry cough was worse.

Minseok could see what was coming and boiled up a broth of meaty bones, seaweed, and enough garlic to drive off even a hungry succubus. It tasted horrible and made the cat flee to a far corner of the cottage, but Chen didn’t seem to notice. He drank it, wrapped up in his blankets and starting to shiver.

In the morning, Minseok changed him out of the reeking, damp clothes he’d slept in, dripped water in him again, and endured the discomfort of laying cool hands on Chen’s neck until the man’s fevered thrashing quieted. Then he walked into town to fetch Yixing.

“Yes, water in the lungs,” Xing said after briefly resting his hands on Chen’s chest. “Nice work with that broth, it definitely helped. Oof, what a stench!”

Minseok grinned.

“There’s more of it left.”

“No thank you,” Yixing said. “Please don’t force any of that on me afterward.”

Minseok promised. He set the kettle over a fire and changed his bedding. By the time a mug of nettle tea was steeping, Chen gave a series deep, hacking coughs bent over Yixing’s arm that Xing echoed.

“There you go. Get it all out. Sleep the rest of it off,” Yixing said while he helped Chen lay back.

Minseok caught Yixing before he tipped over sideways and bundled Xing into his own bed, held his head until the tea was finished.

“Thank you.”

Minseok brushed Xing’s hair to one side and watched his eyelids start to refuse to open.

“My duty,” Yixing mumbled. “Nice to be coddled after, though.”

“Yes, well, you know I owe you. Rest well.”

Despite two heavy sleepers and the prospect of his own sleep being upright in a chair with Tan trying to take up half the seat, Minseok thought the silence had a lighter quality to it. He hummed while he mopped up the floor, then spent some time cleaning the broken piece of statuary he’d found on the beach several days before.

Chen woke him at dawn by sitting bolt upright and staring around with evident alarm. He held his hands in front of himself as if they were weapons.

Minseok made more noise than he needed to while he rose from his chair and walked slowly to the hearth to light a lamp. He stayed beyond arm’s reach when he crouched down on the floor and set it in front of him. Chen watched him with lips pressed tight together, until his head tilted and he let out a breath.

“You. Please remind me of your name. I think I was not in my right mind.”

“Minseok.”

Chen nodded. He looked down at the blankets he sat in. His nose wrinkled, and Minseok had to smile at it.

“I feel like I’ve been breathing shards of glass.”

His voice was still hoarse, but he no longer sounded as if he were speaking around a set of rusty knives.

“The water you breathed in got infected. I called my healer friend in to help,” Minseok said, gesturing toward the Yixing-lump in the bed. “His work is reliable but rarely comfortable.”

“I owe you my life twice over,” Chen said.

“Nonsense. Privy, water, or wash?”

All three in that order, as it turned out. Chen was weak as a newborn foal, but greater clarity of mind brought with it modesty. Minseok grinned as the privy door shut firmly in his face. By the time a bucket was heating for a wash by the fire, Yixing stirred and stretched. Minseok watched Chen go still and scan the room – possibly for weapons – when Yixing sat up.

“Ah, you look better,” Xing said. “You were in no condition to want to fight me yesterday.”

Chen had the grace to look embarrassed. He submitted to Yixing’s brief examination of his lymph nodes and his energies.

“You’ll be weak and sore for a few days. Eat everything Minseok gives you and move around slowly as much as you can. My healing isn’t as gentle as I wish it were, but you’ll be fine. I’ll check in soon.”

Yixing refused the offer of breakfast and left them with a cheerful wave. Minseok handed some clean clothes to Chen and turned away.

“What do I do with the bucket?” Chen asked when the splashing stopped.

Minseok felt one eyebrow quirk. A rich man, then. Possibly even a noble. He wouldn’t want to stay in this tumbledown cottage for long.

“I’ll toss it onto the garden out back. Don’t you try; you’ll be too unsteady on your feet, still. Here, stir this while I take care of it.”

Chen approached him with only a tiny hesitation to show his wariness. He took the spoon Minseok handed him and dabbed lightly at the vegetables in the pan.

“Stir it,” Minseok laughed. “Properly, I won’t make a second round, so we’ll have to eat it even if you let it burn.”

He watered his small garden patch with the contents of the bucket and happily discovered an unburnt meal when he returned, though Chen still held the spoon as if it were a calligraphy brush.

So obviously a rich person and a warrior, washed up on the beach in a country not his own. Prevailing currents would suggest that he went into the water across the narrow strait that separated Elyxion from Exordium. The great majority of Minseok’s scars and weather-forecasting aches had been obtained in Exordium, and that country had spent the past 4 years since the war ended fighting amongst themselves to see who came out on top. In his little seaside retreat, Minseok barely had to work at all to avoid the news, but the last he had heard, months previously, was that some poor kid from the old royal family had survived and been found hiding in the mountains. That was back in the spring, though – the kid had probably been torn in half by rival factions now. Minseok hoped not literally.

Anyway, Minseok didn’t much care where Chen came from. The lesson that the people not in charge were much the same in any country had been very thoroughly learned over the course of 5 years of fighting and fucking and failing to not feel guilty every time he “borrowed” a farmhouse or villa to quarter his soldiers.

The only thing Minseok cared about was whether Chen would bring more war with him; given his nude, beaten, unconscious state on the beach, that seemed unlikely. Chen followed Minseok around, mostly silent, all day.

“Can I help?”

Minseok paused with his armload of clothes and bedding, headed to the beach for the first step of washing.

“Probably not,” he said. “I’m amazed you’re upright. But you can carry a few more blankets, if you wish.”

Chen followed, blankets in his arms, and fell asleep in the shade of a rock while Minseok scrubbed. Minseok let him sleep while he carried wet things back up to the house for a rinse in fresh water and hung them on the line. Chen was just starting to stretch and frown when Minseok went back for him.

“Done already?”

Minseok grinned.

“You’ve been asleep all afternoon.”

Chen glowered at the sand.

“Don’t fret about it. You’ve obviously had a rough few days, even before Yixing healed you. Sit there and I’ll catch our dinner.”

He felt Chen’s eyes on him while he stood in the surf, casting out his line until he reeled in a trio of small fish, and later while he watched Minseok roast the fish over the fire. He ate with the relish of a man who was too far out from his last meal and handed bites to Tan with the smile of one who enjoyed being generous.

“You don’t ask many questions,” Chen said while he dried the dishes.

“No,” Minseok said.

Chen’s hands paused, and he huffed a short laugh. But he stacked the dishes neatly, stumbled back to his pile of clean blankets, and actually bade Minseok goodnight before his rolled over with his face against the wall.

The next day, he was brighter, despite sleeping away most of the afternoon again, and he _was_ one to ask questions – about the town and the beach treasures strewn about. He made an effort to help with meal preparation, and he wasn’t even useless at it, which made Minseok wonder about revising his assessment that Chen was high status. Until, that is, after dinner, when Chen asked to borrow a comb and spent the better part of an hour combing his hair until it hung straight and shining down to his lower back.

“I don’t suppose you have a hairpin,” he said.

Minseok had to laugh. One disadvantage of enjoying his treasure hunts along the beach without needing the income of selling things was that he had a small hoard encompassing a little of everything in boxes and bags around the cottage. He rummaged through a wooden box where he kept small pieces, pulled out a brass pin with a creamy yellow bead, at the top and handed it over.

Chen wound his hair deftly into a complex knot and secured it with the pin. With the fading bruises on his torso covered by a rough indigo-dyed jacket and his hair no longer a wild tangle around his face, he looked like visiting royalty, all contrast and angle in the light of the fire. Minseok had retrieved many beautiful things from the shore, but in that moment, he thought Chen might be the loveliest.

“You look better,” he said.

Chen grinned: a swift, broad smile that lit the air around him.

“I feel like myself,” he said. “And since I rather thought several days ago that I was meeting my end in the sea, it’s a pleasant surprise.”

Chen never did say why he had been beaten and thrown into the water. He slotted smoothly into Minseok’s days – watching closely before stepping in to help with chores and asking endless questions about Minseok’s beach gleanings. His laughter rang through the cottage when he played with Tan. A couple of times, Minseok caught himself staring at Chen with more warmth than was wise, considering. He tried his best to pack any such ideas away.

Chen was slow to wake in the mornings, so Minseok continued to take his dawn walks alone, with the added pleasure of arriving home to find tea already steeping, the cottage seeming somehow more comfortable for Chen’s presence in it. But when Minseok declared his intention to walk into town, Chen folded in on himself like a frightened spider and refused to go.

It was curious. But Minseok hadn't even run through every reason he could think of why a person might wish to hide by the time he got to the market, so it wasn’t important.

Yixing walked back with him, cheerful company on the sunny shoreline path. He examined his erstwhile patient and declared himself satisfied. He entertained the two of them over lunch, while Minseok watched Chen's eyes start to lose some of their wariness.

“Ah, no, not all of us have lives of decrepit ease,” Yixing laughed when Minseok pressed him to stay the afternoon. “I have other patients to check on. Much as I’d like to hide out here indefinitely.”

He leaned in to kiss Minseok – briefly, but on the mouth – and walked out, laughing.

One of the first lessons Minseok had learned from his sword master was that the first person to move is often the one to lose. He waited, to see what move Chen might make.

“You’re lovers,” Chen said after a time.

“On occasion. When the mood strikes,” Minseok said.

Chen nodded and cleared the dishes from the table.

Minseok thought that was the extent of it, until some time after they had turned down the lamps, and Chen climbed into his bed.

“What are you doing?”

Chen crouched over him, warm and smelling of the sea, and touched lips to his neck. Minseok had no idea what to do with his hands.

“Expressing my gratitude,” Chen murmured.

Minseok tried to squirm, which only increased his body’s certainty that this was an excellent idea.

“You don’t have to do that.”

Chen bit his neck, briefly but hard enough to make Minseok yelp.

“I’ll stop if you want me to, but I’d much rather do this than lie on the floor and watch the moonlight move across your face, as I’ve done the past couple of nights,” Chen said.

Minseok had to laugh a little. That, at least, cleared up what to do with his hands. He set them on Chen’s narrow hips, then tilted his chin to meet Chen’s mouth.

His and Yixing’s trysts were always full of a calm affection that left no question that both partners would find satisfaction. Chen was inexpert in his ministrations, but his eagerness let Minseok set aside his qualms about slightly too much teeth applied to his tenderest parts. The desperate catch in Chen’s voice when Minseok wrapped lips around the width of his cock inspired Minseok to pull out all his skills.

Even better was afterward, the way Chen butted his head against Minseok’s chin and wound around him like Tan on a cold day, except with kisses less rough and smelling of fish. Minseok found himself laughing softly, fingers in Chen’s hair.

“What brought that on?”

Chen hummed and pressed tighter against Minseok’s body. Minseok tugged the blanket over them both.

“You save my life, nurse me through illness, and let me slip into your life without asking me a single question, all the while looking like a temple sculpture stepped down off its pedestal? How was I supposed to _not_ want to put my hands on you?”

Minseok tightened his arms around his warm and delightful surprise.

“Temple sculpture, eh?”

“Honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if you sprouted wings,” Chen said.

“Alas, all my parts are standard,” Minseok said.

“No alas about it.”

Chen never did go back to his nest of blankets on the floor – it made rising for the morning walk somewhat difficult on Minseok, between the clinging warmth of Chen’s limbs and the temptation of his soft, sleeping mouth. For a turn of the moon, Minseok allowed himself to touch whenever he wanted, to kiss Chen until they both lost track of their own breath. Chen never did say anything about who he was or why he had ended up in the sea. Minseok figured it meant that a clock was counting down, and he’d make as many memories as possible in the interim.

He always asked before he went into town – still, he was surprised the day Chen agreed to accompany him. It was like the first days all over again: Chen peered around eagerly from under Minseok’s extra sun hat at the changing landscape with a hundred questions. At the market, he turned vegetables over in his hands with a smile on his face, traced made goods with elegant gestures.

Minseok fought off the urge to buy everything Chen touched.

At one stall draped with piles of jewelry – simple strings of beads and pieces in brass and silver – Chen removed his hat to peer closer at a tray of hairpins.

“You’ve got the look of Exordium about you,” the stallkeeper said.

Minseok was suddenly, dreadfully aware that he had come out unarmed.

Chen went perfectly still, then slid his hat back on and smiled – a broad, stiff thing nothing like the smiles Minseok was used to.

“I can’t imagine why you’d say so,” he said smoothly, and touched a hairpin. “Is this agate?”

“No one around here pins their hair up like that,” the woman pressed. “Too complex by far for our folk. And you’ve got that square jaw they always talk about in the romances about Exordian princes.”

“So not agate, then?” Chen asked in a voice cold as a winter gale.

“It’s jasper,” the woman said.

She peered at Chen while they walked away. All ease was gone from Chen’s posture. Minseok was hardly surprised when, at the edge of town, Chen dropped his string bag of vegetables to the ground with a mumbled apology and took off running toward the cottage.

Minseok mastered his foreboding and walked slowly back, to give Chen time to calm himself. Hopefully not time to pack a bundle and disappear.

Hope was tricky: when Minseok rounded the last dune before home and saw Chen sitting in the doorway with Tan in his arms, it was all Minseok could do not to drop all their purchases himself. His knees tried to go astray.

“All right?” he asked.

“Don’t know,” Chen said while he scratched Tan’s neck.

All the questions he’d been so careful not to ask washed into Minseok’s mind. He braced himself under the tumult, and they washed back out again. What did he need to know, other than Chen was here, bright and lovely, filling his drafty cottage with kisses and laughter?

He had his own secrets, and they mattered as little as Chen’s did.

“Sounds like you could use dinner, then,” Minseok said. “And maybe a drink.”

One of Chen’s winged brows lifted. He stared up at Minseok with his mouth pressed into a thin, flat line. Then he nodded.

“A drink would be most welcome,” he said.

Chen’s wrinkled nose and grimace over Yixing’s vile homebrew made Minseok laugh in recognition of his own reaction to the stuff when he first tasted it.

“It’s no Doradan red, is it?” Minseok asked in a calculated risk.

Chen stared into his cup, eyebrows pulling together again.

“Do you have Doradan wine here? In Elyxion?” he asked.

“Not that I ever saw,” Minseok said. “Except at the palace once.”

“Palace?”

Chen snapped his mouth shut immediately after asking.

Minseok tossed a grin over the cooktop.

“As if you’re the only one with an exciting past around here.”

He handed the bottle of homebrew back behind him and waited to see the outcome of his statement.

“I guess I’d like to hear Tan’s exploits of derring-do,” Chen said eventually.

Minseok laughed again and spun a tale over dinner involving pirates and a stolen cargo of dried fish that had Chen holding his belly and stomping his feet, the tension of the afternoon dissipated. Chen clung to him that night, mouth and hands eager, until Minseok rolled over atop him and held him down, pulled them both together to each consecutive release. Cleaned up and twined together after, Minseok closed his eyes to savor the drag of Chen’s soft fingertips against his cheek.

Chen rose with him in the morning and walked next to him down the beach in silence

“You were in Exordium?” Chen said when they paused before turning around. “During the war.”

“I was.”

“That’s where you had Doradan wine.”

“Yes,” Minseok said.

He waited until they were halfway back to the house to ask,

“Did you fight as well?”

“No,” Chen said. “I wasn’t allowed.”

And then, a few paces further,

“Do you know that jewelry seller?”

“I don’t,” Minseok said.

“So you don’t know what she might say to whom.”

Minseok watched Chen fold in on himself across the table. He realized he was already saying goodbye, in his mind.

“I can help, if you need to leave,” he said. “I can set you up with supplies and money. Yixing has connections in other towns. Everyone helpful I know is in the capitol, you probably don’t want that, but I can get you on the road, we can cut your hair – “

“I can’t cut my hair,” Chen cried out.

There was a whole host of questions answered for Minseok all at once, in a way he wouldn’t have expected: to end up with an Exordian royal or priest washed up at his doorstep. He composed his expression into calm, so as not to frighten Chen with knowledge.

“All right,” he said. “The offer still stands.”

“But I don’t want to go,” Chen whispered.

Longing rolled through Minseok like a wave. Dinner and dishes were abandoned in favor of kissing one another with newfound desperation and each clutching the other with rough hands. When he came, Chen’s shout sounded more like a sob than anything else. Minseok held Chen close afterward, coming that long, soft hair with his fingers.

Tan, of course, was the one who saved the day. Another half-turn of the moon had gone by – fretful, anxious days, both of them trying to pretend nothing was wrong and neither of them able to settle. Neither of them able to keep hands or mouth off the other, both of them pretending to sleep and giving up at dawn with dark circles under their eyes, walking up and down the beach until the sun was high.

They were both spinning idly around the house amid the too-long afternoon hours, when Tan froze, glaring at the door with her tail held stiff and vertical. Minseok stared. She opened her mouth and hissed, almost silent, and he moved.

Four years was enough time to get out of the habit of arming himself any time he left the house. But Minseok knew the location of every weapon in his house, in the privy, and under a basket in the garden. By the time the door opened, Minseok had his roll of throwing knives out from behind the rice canister and open, had shoved Jongdae onto the bed, and all the kitchen knives were close to hand.

Whoever it was had sent only one man: a pity for them. Within a dozen heartbeats the man was already akin to a pincushion, so startled by his unexpected leaks that he barely struggled against Minseok driving him to the floor, cleaver held to his throat.

“Who?” Minseok growled.

“Everyone,” the man said through blood-covered teeth. “You poor bastard, everyone will come for him.”

In the meantime, Minseok made sure this man in particular had no future ahead of him other than feeding the denizens of the sea. He dragged the corpse out to the beach to find time and tide on his side: the tide was going out. He walked the body out into the water until currents pulled at him, then let it go, where it floated toward the sunset and the hungry mouths of turtles and sharks.

By the time he limped back into the house, Chen very nearly had the floor clean of bloodstains. His face was pale as salt, and his eyes were puffy and red.

“Let me help.”

Chen scowled at him.

“With that limp? The last thing you should be doing is crawling around on the floor. Do you need Yixing?”

“No, this wound’s too old for him to do anything. Are you all right?”

Chen sat back on his heels and gazed up, looking weary and heartsore. Minseok wished for a better right ankle and a body less covered in blood and seawater, that he might crouch down and take Chen into his arms, try to drive some of the sadness out of his face.

“I owe you my life all over again,” Chen said.

“You owe me nothing,” Minseok said.

Chen turned away to continue scrubbing the floor. Minseok sat to breathe through the pain in his leg and endure Tan’s smug refusal to permit more than the briefest of ear-scratches.

Whoever he was, Chen scrubbed the floor clean of blood like he knew what he was doing. He hadn’t known what to do with a wash bucket, or how to work a cookstove, but he knew how to scrub floors. Such a curious man. When the bloody bucket had been dumped outside and sand sprinkled to dry the floor, Chen stopped Minseok’s rising with a squeeze to one shoulder and set another bucket of water by the fire to heat.

“I miss a proper bathhouse,” he said.

Minseok found himself able to laugh softly.

“As do I. There’s one in town, if you don’t mind stinking of seaweed and enduring an endless conversation about the catching, gutting, and salting of fish.”

“A _proper_ bathhouse,” Chen repeated.

He washed Minseok’s hands clean with a gentleness that almost made Minseok more sleepy than aroused. He took Minseok’s ankle between his hands and rubbed at the knots of scar tissue.

“War wound?”

“Yes,” Minseok said. “I had the poor judgement to wait to get it until the month before the treaty.”

“Do you resent it? All the fighting you did, the lives lost, for Exordium’s own internal troubles?”

“We were honoring our duty as allies,” Minseok said: the coward’s non-answer, true only on the surface.

“For all the good it did,” Chen said.

His thumbs dug into a particularly stubborn knot; Minseok sighed.

“Are you a priest or royal?” he asked after a length of silence.

Chen looked up sharply, frowning.

“Your hair.”

Chen sighed and dropped his gaze.

“I’m not a priest,” he said.

But that was all he said.

“Was the man right?” Minseok asked. “Will everyone come for you?”

Lips compressed into an unhappy line, Chen nodded.

Minseok pulled his leg out of Chen's grasp. If that was so, they had no time for gentle massages and meaningful conversations. He made his hands cold and set them on his ankle until it turned pale.

“You have a power,” Chen breathed. “Like Yixing.”

“For what little good it does, calling forth cold,” Minseok said

If he was an Exordian royal, Chen had a power too: anyone with powers in that country was either holy or noble, no matter what their birth had been.

In the meantime, he followed Minseok’s instructions and retrieved the leather ankle brace from the chest next to the bed. He frowned mightily at Minseok’s plan but joined in the process of packing sacks full of bedding, clothes, and food.

“Stop scowling,” Minseok said while they set the traps he had long ago installed in the doorways and around the cottage.

“We can hope the earlier unpleasantness was incorrect and we’ll simply spend a few days camping down the beach. It’ll be romantic!”

Chen scowled harder. His pout was most attractive; Minseok regretted how unwise it would be to pause long enough to kiss that lower lip back to its accustomed position.

“What about Tannie?” Chen asked as they walked out into the night, each with a blanket tied around his waist to muffle their footprints in the sand.

“She’ll visit when she feels like it and keep herself safe,” Minseok said. “She knows the spot where we’re going.”

Chen kept his accustomed quiet until they rounded the corner at the beach and slipped behind a pillar of stone that looked from the sea like part of the cliff face, then into the cave behind it.

“Hold on, should’ve lit the lantern outside,” Minseok said while he fumbled in the dark.

The cave lit up with a harsh bluish light. Minseok startled and turned to see Chen cradling a ball of lightning in his palm.

“I have a power too,” he said sadly.

Minseok lit the lantern, and Chen let the lightning go out.

“I knew you must have a power,” Minseok said when they sat down to a cold meal on the sandy cave floor. “If you were a noble or a priest. I’ve never seen anything like lightning, though. Is that light the extent of it?”

Chen frowned at his hands.

“No. It took me many years to learn enough control to only make light.”

Minseok recognized the tone of voice, having heard it dozens of times from his own soldiers after particularly terrible battles, or after the loss of friends: that tone of heartbreak.

“Well, it was certainly helpful just now,” Minseok said.

He wondered when Chen would believe that he wasn’t going to ask. However much he wanted to be told.

They were hard days, stuck in the dimness of the cave with little to do and less by way of comfort. They had plenty to eat, but Minseok missed his walks on the beach. They both missed the books and chores from the cottage. They didn’t argue, exactly, though tension stretched tight their voices, made their conversations as brittle as shells. They held each other close in the dark of night, mouths and hands frantic on one another.

On the second day, Minseok found a body in the vegetable patch behind the house; on the fifth day, he found two living but incapacitated people caught in traps inside.

“The price on his head is worth more than your life,” one of them said. “I’ll split it with you.”

Yixing didn’t advertise that someone could be slowly and painfully “healed” of their own memories, but by dawn, there were two fewer people to worry about, and Minseok dragged Yixing with him to the cave to recover. Chen scowled at their arrival and tucked Yixing into a bedroll.

On the seventh day, a party of strangers fanned out in front of the cave. Minseok unrolled his throwing knives and strapped his ankle.

“You just need a couple minutes,” Yixing muttered from his bed.

Minseok shook himself. He gave Chen one of the kitchen knives from the house.

“Stay back. Guard him.”

He hadn’t chosen this cave just because it was hidden from view – the rock pillar that shielded the entrance had been smoothed by erosion on the beach side but was craggy and climbable inside. The ledge just above shoulder height wasn’t comfortable by any means, but it made a nice protected perch for one small man with a bow, 3 dozen arrows, and a dozen throwing knives.

He was rusty with the bow, but only the most hardened soldiers could bear to disregard an arrow poking out of them, even if it was somewhere not dangerous, like an upper arm or a foot. This group had nothing like the discipline of his own men during the war, but there were easily 30 of them, and even when he’d been at his best, not all of Minseok’s arrows would’ve found their mark.

Still, it gained him time. Maybe with enough of it, he could think of something that would save them. The sea air was damp: salt made things more difficult, but if he could bottle them up enough to take a dozen or so out, he might be able to freeze the air in the remaining men’s lungs.

It’d probably kill him, but that thought had never bothered him much.

Minseok fired his last 10 arrows: 4 misses, 2 men down, and another 4 incapacitated for at least a few minutes. He dropped to the sand, for a better stance to use his knives. Eighteen men remained upright, not all of them steady, but it was enough to make very bad odds. He’d had to let them get close to be accurate with the knives, and several of them had spears.

He edged out, sacrificing some cover in favor of more space.

It made for an interesting view when one of the attackers sprouted a crossbow bolt through his shoulder and another went up in flames.

No matter the reason for it, Minseok recognized help when he saw it. One of the men closest to him had flung his sword to one side as he fell – Minseok ran for it, launching knives for cover as he went, while the newest bunch closed in on the intruders from behind and another soldier went up like kindling.

Burning was awful. Minseok cut that man down as soon as the sword was in his hand.

He took a few minor hits, and he had no idea who the new people were helping. They were uncommonly tall, hooded like thieves.

“Prince Jongdae!” one of them called out. “Prince Jongdae!”

Chen darted into the melee. Minseok was so shocked that he hesitated and caught a blow to the leg that made him stagger. He swung and knocked the offending sword away while Chen ran into the arms of the tallest hooded person.

His opponent, on the return stroke, punched him in the chest with the pommel, and Minseok went down, breathless and ears ringing, eyes still locked on Chen in the tall person’s embrace.

What a surprising way to go, rendered useless by the revelation of an outbreak of emotion directed at a mysterious houseguest with clever hands, a wicked smile, and, it appeared, someone else.

Even as the edges of his vision started to bubble with black, Minseok shifted his grip on his sword. He might be on the verge of discovering the afterlife, but he’d take his opponent out on the way if he could.

Said opponent, however, stopped moving when a bolt of lightning out of the cloud-free sky struck the ground close enough that Minseok felt its heat through his feet. Minseok couldn’t blame the man. It was rather a shock. A bolt from the blue.

Laughing required breathing, and that turned into coughing, at the end of which Minseok found himself still alive and even more surprised. The sand was still smoking.

“Min!” Chen cried.

Minseok stared while Chen scrabbled at him, tugged his own shirt off and pressed it painfully to the wound on Minseok’s leg. The sounds of a battle coming to an end clattered around them. Chen’s tall person took charge of Minseok’s erstwhile opponent by means of an ungentle trussing. Then he pulled off his hood.

It was, improbably, someone Minseok recognized.

“Commander Park?”

The man looked down, then at Chen, then down again, with disbelief widening his eyes.

“Highness. You’ve been. How did you?”

Commander Park of the Exordian elite force knelt beside Chen and tied the shirt around Minseok’s leg tightly enough to make him hiss.

“General Xiumin,” he said, “I don’t know how my lord Jongdae came to be under your protection, but if there was anyone I would’ve picked in Elyxion to guard him, it would’ve been you.”

Minseok stared between the two of them: Chen’s scowl of concern and Commander Park’s burn-scarred face, not seen in years. A fire-user, Minseok remembered.

“General what?” Chen asked.

Commander Park laid one mast-long arm across Chen’s shoulders.

“You didn’t know?” he said. “This is General Xiumin of the Exlyian Third Legion. He helped us push the rebels back from the coast and kept them away long enough to break the famine in the capitol.”

“Xiumin?” Chen asked.

Minseok grunted.

“The jade rock my enemies break upon,” he said, and then coughed, probably because it always sounded so ridiculous.

“And you are – his lord Jongdae,” Minseok said.

He didn’t mean to sound quite to wry, but he’d had a challenging few minutes. Chen’s fingers tightened on the makeshift bandage. He nodded.

“Who’s Chen, then?”

Commander Park startled.

“You told him your coronation name?”

Minseok’s jaw found itself seeking the sand.

“What does it matter?” Chen – Jongdae – said, chin jutting. “I’ll never use it.”

Commander Park sagged to the sand. He gripped Jongdae’s arm, and his eyes looked wet.

“You? You’ve killed someone?”

Minseok briefly wished he’d been raised with religion, so that he’d have some god to swear at.

“No,” Jongdae snarled. “I’ve done everything right, kept my hands clean and my hair unshorn, but what exact country am I supposed to rule, Chanyeol? Exordium doesn’t want me. Pretty sure the folks who beat me half to death and threw me into the sea made that as abundantly clear as this crowd.”

“Oh, is that how it’s going to be?” another pointlessly tall person said.

Their own hood pulled back revealed a long, narrow face. Not-Chen scowled up at this man.

“We’re the ones who lost you on the mountain road and somehow that’s some kind of portent that your whole life is over and you have to live in a cave forever?”

“Sehun - “ the Person Formerly Known as Chen whined.

“That’s what you get for wandering off by yourself to pee,” the third tree trunk said before uncovering the kind of face that tended to show up on statues in museums or temples.

“He always does that,” Commander Park said. “Insists on all this modesty.”

Minseok remembered the privy door shut in his face and erupted into the giggle of mild blood loss. How embarrassing. If only he had the energy to feel bad about it.

“I don't _live_ in the cave,” he said. “Got a house. Cave’s just a hideout.”

“Minseok,” the stranger in a strange land said, “are you all right?”

“Gonna faint any minute,” he said.

That inspired a bit of dashing about, and Minseok did take a little rest, but he didn’t think it had been very long before he woke to the exciting sensation of homebrew being poured over his leg wound, followed by a long and terrible stitching-up process.

“Sorry,” Yixing said, holding Minseok’s shoulders down with a strength that made a liar of him. “I’m tapped out, but these nice Exordians seem to know what they’re doing.”

They didn’t draw matters out, anyhow, even if they did take advantage of his post-stitches stupor to somehow talk Fake-Chen and Yixing into returning to the house. The two tall, beautiful infants gathered the belongings from the cave. Apparently-Jongdae and Yixing tried to put their arms around him for the limp back up the beach.

“Commander Park,” Minseok said, “I’ll take your arm, please.”

Which ended in the indignity of being draped across Commander Park’s back for most of the journey, but Minseok was busy making a point, he didn’t have time to worry about such things as good sense and emotional maturity.

Also, his leg really hurt. And his veins were a bit low.

The house had been thoroughly tossed. Minseok sat on the front step and let all the people who had not been recently embroidered deal with the mess. Tan slunk out eventually and pressed against his side.

“You could’ve asked, you know,” the unknown not-soldier groused from behind him.

Minseok scratched behind Tan’s ears.

“Because of course you would’ve told me the truth,” he said to the path that led to the beach.

Prince Mysterious cursed under his breath and stomped away. Minseok eventually let Commander Park lure him back inside with the promise of a tidied house and a meal. They’d done all right putting the cottage back together. The pile of broken items in the corner was smaller than Minseok had feared it might be. And anyhow, he’d taken the bag of gemstones with him to the cave. There had been little else of any real value.

Dinner was largely quiet and not at all relaxed. Commander Park and his infants ate with the focused speed of those still in the fight, which gave him the upper hand when it came to speaking. Also, he was canny enough to wait until Minseok’s mouth was full.

“Highness, you’ll return with us, of course?”

Minseok chewed with more vigor than a mouthful of fish stew required.

“Why should I?” pseudo-Chen gritted. “So more people can try to kill me? It’s not worth it, I ruin everything I touch.”

“How?” the angel-infant, Jongin, asked while Commander Park made a face Minseok usually saw among harassed parents of small children at market.

“Nobody wants me to be king, Jongin.”

“Jongdae, we were literally escorting you down from the mountains to go to your literal coronation. A few of the assholes who’ve been causing all the trouble of the past ten years are not representative of the general population,” Sehun said.

“I’ll just mess it up.”

“Who says so?” Commander Park said. “We won, Jongdae. It’s not going to be like up in the mountains, you won’t be alone. You don’t have to run anymore. We’ll be by your side – “

“No,” Chen-Jongdae said. “No, you can’t, Chanyeol, I’ve done enough to you.”

Commander Park put one hand over his face and groaned. Jongin sighed. Sehun thunked his cup down on the table.

“What did he do to you?” Minseok asked.

“I ruined his face with my power!” Jongdae-Chen shouted.

Commander Park gazed at Minseok wearily.

“What, the burn scar?” Minseok’s mouth said without brainial input.

Jong-Chen-Dae made an unhappy noise. Commander Park rolled his eyes. Minseok allowed himself the fond vision of smacking his apparent prince on the head with a spoon.

“I’d like to know how that face is ruined,” he said. “Since we always had to draw lots to be quartered as far away from him as possible if we ever wanted to get any sleep, given the parade in and out of his room and the intervening noise.”

Commander Park made the broad, cheeky grin that had lifted skirts and dropped trousers throughout Minseok’s entire acquaintance.

“That was all _true_?” Chendae spluttered.

The tall persons made a number of rude sounds.

“I certainly wouldn’t say no,” Yixing said, returning an arch smile with the power of his own dimples.

“Lie to him once when you’re twelve years old about the edibility of green apples and he never believes a word afterward,” Commander Park said to Minseok as if divulging a secret. “Then you go and stand in the wrong spot when you’re twenty and all hope of his being normal is lost.”

“You were not. Standing. In the wrong spot. Chanyeol,” Jongchen growled.

“I guess it was a little alarming to be struck by lightning in the face,” Commander Park mused. “But I mean. How long did I milk it? I got a year’s worth of lemon cakes and a full set of armor out of it.”

“Your cock sucked on demand until you left for the front,” Sehun said.

Yixing very nearly had to deal with an entire table of people asphyxiating. It was unfortunate, since he was also choking on his cup of tea.

“Came here and messed everything up too,” one very red-faced Exordian royal said.

“Oh, please,” Yixing said while he wiped his face. “The only thing you messed up for Min was denying him the opportunity of a dramatic death in your defense, leaving him alive to have to deal with his mess of feelings. He hates that.”

Minseok tried to remember what it was, exactly, that he had ever liked about Yixing.

Commander Park laughed.

“I live in a proper house with actual room dividers. And it happens to be down the street from a very pleasant tavern,” Yixing continued.

“Doesn’t that sound marvelous,” Commander Park said. “I guess we’ll see you two in the morning.”

All of them – monsters to a man – left.

Not only leaving him alone with Jongdae, but also leaving all the dirty dishes.

“Don’t you dare stand up on that leg.”

Minseok did not dare stand up on his leg. He probably wouldn’t have been successful even if he’d tried. He watched the now-familiar movement of those small hands and realized that he had to think of their owner as Jongdae. If Chen was to be the name of a king. King of the nation across the sea, with a lifetime’s worth of obligations.

But when the dishes were clean, Jongdae sat in the chair across from him at the battered table, hands folded and eyes downcast. The mouth Minseok had come to cherish kissing was turned down at the edges.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Jongdae tried to shrug, unconvincingly.

“I thought it didn’t matter,” he said. “I thought all that was over. That the only people who’d come for me were the ones who wanted me dead. And if I could hide out here long enough, they’d forget about me too, and I could just. Be me.”

“And where did you plan to do that? Be yourself.”

“I kind of thought here with you.”

Jongdae said this to Tan on the floor, in a voice both quiet and miserable.

After a stress-filled week culminating in a day that had been the worst kind of exciting, Minseok found that he no longer had the stamina to maintain his snit.

“I would’ve liked that,” he said.

Did his expression break open, like Jongdae’s did? Had he ever kissed anyone with such desperate tenderness? His leg wound was an obstacle; but once they were still and quiet in the bed, Jongdae crouched over him, as he had that first time. He pulled the pin free from his hair. It cascaded down around them and made a dark space in which there were no obligations or secrets. Only their two mouths moving together, until sleep overtook them.

By the time Commander Park et al returned the next day, Minseok was already calculating whether it was possible to tear one’s heart in two and live with half as many heartbeats. Sehun and Jongin took Jongdae in hand, with unguents and cosmetics; they shoved Minseok out of his own house. He hobbled down to the beach with Commander Park’s assistance to sit in the shade of the large rock. Tan tripped over after them and settled herself by Misneok’s knee.

“I still can’t believe we found him,” Commander Park said eventually. “I can’t believe he was with you.”

Minseok hummed.

“He’s the youngest of three. He never for a minute thought he’d be crowned. It’s been hard, since his older sister died of fever just after your people drew back. Just trying to convince him that he can do it. That we need him.”

“Is that so,” Minseok said.

The waves rolled in and out on the shore. Seabirds called to one another. A fishing boat passed from north to south against the current.

“He’ll have to make a dynastic marriage,” Commander Park said, as if he were commenting on the weather. “An heir, a spare, and a third, if he knows what’s good for him.”

Minseok loved the sea. Such beauty and calm on the surface, and underneath, it was full of things outfitted with so many dozens of teeth.

“Honestly, our whole government’s a shambles. We’ll be lucky to get back on our own feet without getting steamrolled by all our neighbors. We need friendly ambassadors as much as we need Jongdae. Are you still close with Commander-General Junmyeon?”

Minseok turned to stare, as Commander Park had intended. Chanyeol it should be, he supposed. How neatly Chanyeol had managed him. What a lot there would be to do.

“Of course,” Minseok said.

“There are a number of quite lovely houses set aside near the palace for foreign dignitaries. You know, there was always a rumor that a couple of them even have secret passages. There was that rumor about Jongdae’s grandmother and the ambassador from Lishan.”

“I always heard she was more pirate than ambassador,” Minseok said.

“Very true,” Chanyeol said. “She was beautiful, nonetheless. You should seek out her portrait, after you arrive.”

Down the path from the house, Minseok watched Jongdae step across the sand. The pin holding up his hair sparkled in the sunshine, and Sehun was holding the hem of Jongdae’s blue robes off the ground. The cosmetics had made a mask of his face: black winged brows, heavily lined eyes, and shadows under his cheekbones. But Minseok could see the face he wanted under all that.

It would be nothing like the silence of his house by the shore. But there would still be peace. He would even help make it. Along with people to cook his meals, and proper baths.

And Jongdae.

Jongdae stopped at the end of the path and stared over at him and Chanyeol. The makeup wasn’t enough to hide the trepidation on his face.

Tan rose from her curl and trotted over. She wound herself against Jongdae’s ankles, one after the other. He smiled down at her. She sat on her haunches and batted at his hanging sleeve.

As signs went, it was better than most. Minseok hauled himself to his feet, already planning the speech he would have to make to Junmyeon to achieve his ambassadorship. Already planning to cross the sea.


End file.
